I have a confession to make...

I don't like WordPress. I have decided after spending the last few hours tryin to figure out how to get a drop down menu at the top :cursing: ! Which it would seem is not very easy. Even though in my theme (that I made, and bought a program to make it) it has them and made me pick all the colours for it????!!!

As much as it meant to be a really simple way to build a site....to me it all seems rather tedious and not very straight forward. I even managed to work Dreamweaver...and started making some nifty looking pages when I realised it is very complicated (to me) to get a site from dreamweaver to WordPress.
I don't know if may it' not the the mst suitable for me as I plan to make a shop, not a blog, but whatever it is it has me pulling my hair out :crying: !!!!

Sam, it's not you
I must admit I am impressed that you even gave it a go. Choosing one of the many free or paid-for templates and adding content is the easy part of WordPress. Designing your own theme and trying to edit it in Dreamweaver is going to prove very difficult for a beginner.

Oh dear, someone else who thinks us developers have an easy job that anyone can do overnight!

Depending on how many items you are planning to list within your store wordpress will be fine with the right plugins, if the number is fairly large then I would look to a proper ecommerce app, which as Mark says above are also available as free open source.

As far as developing a theme for WP is concerned, I never use anything like dreamweaver - trying to get a wysiwyg tool to create a theme is a pain as you have very little control over the actual code created. I use a programmers text editor called e-texteditor which is available with a 30 day free trial. To be totally honest to develop a fully featured wordpress theme and make use of additional plugins within it you will struggle if you don't have a sound understanding of CSS techniques and some basic PHP programming knowledge.

If it's just a couple of wee changes to a free/paid theme that you have, give me a shout and I will see what I can do for you - it's nearly Christmas after all!

Oh dear, someone else who thinks us developers have an easy job that anyone can do overnight!

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I concur!

As an application developer, I try and give pure design tasks a wide berth, and I've never gotten along with anything like Dreamweaver at all!

I generally understand it from a technical point of view, and am able to help out with specific problems (eg my girlfriend stumbled across a few problems customising ZenCart for her online store that I could help with), but it's not something to be taken lightly, unless you're happy to invest the hours on learning what to do, and the right way to do it!

Well I gave up on Dreamweaver and got something called Artisteer, which was very good very simple. If you go to loveasifind.co.uk you can see it so far.

I just find it so annoying that things like changeing a font, adding a picture or just making it look non blog (I did manage to fing that 'Comments closed' and delete it to take it off the home page.

I wanted the drop down menu so that when you hovered over 'Boutique' you chould choose from Lingerie, Nightwear or Accessories. But now I guess I'm goign to have to figure out how to just put them on the Boutique page? Something I'm thinking also will not be very simple lol.

I did find another template I like but it looks different when I actually activate it-instead of being in the middle the sheet if stuck the the left of the page. It's called Damasking 1.4 by Elle Media , but don't lik eht everything in little letters.

I have to admit I agree with Gordon here. These open source free to use systems very rarely offer to true flexibilty required to create a professional looking and as importantly functional site.

In the good old days I was a bit of a dab hand at hard coding through dreamweaver and the CSS etc. however I haven't kept myself in the loop and over the years my skill set has shifted significantly to a more business perspective. I prefer to look at these things the same way as I do any tradesmen. Find myself a good reliable one and they will do you for life. I wouldn't purchase "plumbing for dummies" to fit a new bathroom, I'd call a plumber and get it done properly.

I'd just always prefer to focus on the stuff that really matters to my business rather and let professionals take care of things when I need specialist work done.

When you add a page onto the site, make it the child of another page. The drop-down is automatically created for you.

So if you have a Page called "Services" on your wordpress. Create a page called "Knickers". When you create the page, you can select a Parent category for that page. Go ahead and choose Services as the parent

OK - I'm not trying to dismiss web designers here at all but I think someone has to big up Wordpress a little. I was the same as Sam when I first started to mess with Wordpress, it wasn't that intuitive and I never really grasped it that well.

Now though I absolutely love it and I certainly feel like it was worth spending the time initially to figure it all out. There will be many businesses out there (like Sam) who simply cant afford to pay for a web designer because her business is only just starting out. For me (and i'm not an expert) Wordpress is the best there is in terms of being able to get something up there that looks half decent.

It's certainly not just a blog software and it can be actually made to look quite nice by either using a good quality theme or with a little bit of coding. Not trying to plug my own site here but

Completely Wordpress based using a theme, I dont think anyone can say it's not attractive (maybe some will ). You then have to look at the new theme frameworks coming out like Thesis that just take Wordpress to an entirely different level of customisation (and yes i'm experimenting with it just now so maybe a little biased)

I will acknowledge that it does take a little work keeping it up to date and secure particularly if you are using many plugins etc.

Sam - I would say give Wordpress a bit more time and i'm sure you'll start to get on better. There are more than a few people on here who know Wordpress quite well so take the chance to tap them for their knowledge. You dont need to spend three hours trying to figure something out, shove a post up about it and i'm sure you'll get some speedy replies

, you're absolutely right. WordPress is an ideal platform for people to publish their own professional website without a web designer. (although they can help!)

The mistake Sam has made is to take WordPress and to try and edit it with Dreamweaver. WordPress is a CSS product and Dreamweaver is not a very good CSS editor.

As you say, it's not blog software any more and I've seen some pretty amazing sites made on WordPress. We're using it more and more, and recommending it for our clients as it takes a large part of the development cost away from them and is very customisable.

The lesson to be learned though is don't jump in at the deep end, or you'll end up hating it before you've given it a chance. Start with a theme, read the codex and make your modifications step-by-step.

Investing heaps of development time into a web project is counterproductive if it's not your core skill. You might as well pay someone to do it and do what you do best.

WordPress has improved vastly over the past couple of years, and that has taken it to a new consumer level. In fact, it just won the best overall CMS award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, a big leap from its placement last year.

I have used wordpress in the past and came to the conclusion that while it is a good content management system - flexible, etc - my time was better spent focusing on the business. I have spent hours and hours trying to do relatively simple things which would take a wordpress expert just a few minutes. This is time wasted on my behalf so now I bring in third parties where I lack the necessary skills and focus on growing the business - and growing turnover, profits, etc. This relates to many areas of business, not just wordpress, and allows me to become an expert in my business field. The old saying jack of all trades, master of none, springs to mind for me

...The sharp-end of a decade since that O/P, it's heartening some getting of wisdom. But a little exasperating to see (elsewhere) it's not universal. - the morning rounds of 'first page of Google', 've are velly good veb designers paying our staff 10p an hour, based in the arse end of bangabungo' absolutely boils my P#@@!

Graphic design is a trade in itself - it takes years to learn. Coding is not simple, it's a whole other degree. Advertising, Marketing, PR - How the law impacts on what you're doing... All bits of specialist knowledge. To me it beggars belief that people actually imagine they know other people's trades inside-out to the point where they are able to offer what they do as a 'professional' service. Over the years I've seen some terrible and costly disasters...

I prefer to look at these things the same way as I do any tradesmen. Find myself a good reliable one and they will do you for life. I wouldn't purchase "plumbing for dummies" to fit a new bathroom, I'd call a plumber and get it done properly.

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By odd chance I find myself spending my week off knocking down an old shower cubicle and installing a bath in its place... And there will be much reconstruction of the bathroom necessary after that.

I'm also quite handy with a welder (Mig, Tig, Gas) and metalwork generally, do most of my own car repairs and maintenance (when I have the time), decorating, tiling, spot of plastering... I actually am more qualified than many Electricians to do electrical work! And I actually used to teach multimedia design and construction - what would now pass for 'web design'!

I offer none of these as professional services - for a very good reason!

The trouble is that people can do a 'wee bit' maybe even quite a lot of something, and they start imagining they're more capable than they actually are. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect in educational psychology. - Or writ another way; Jack of All Trades is most likely to be a danger to himself and to other people!